Sunday, March 27, 2011

Well over a century ago, Karl Marx set out to come to grips with history by discovering its laws of motion. The philosophical and scientific underpinnings of this enterprise were significant; the allusion to Newton, deliberate.

In the aftermath, the laws he developed (the labor theory of value, the falling rate of profit, etc.) have proved a most uncertain guide to actual events on the ground. This does not per se refute these laws themselves -- to see this, we need look no farther than physics: Knowledge of the Schrödinger equation, Maxwell’s equations and the rest, is of little help in predicting the evolution of a hurricane or the flight of a bat. And even in the classical arena of a single billiard-ball, prediction quickly breaks down unless the table is one of a sharply restricted set of shapes.

A fortiori, predicting human events at any granularity finer than that of the Kondratieff cycle finds little support in the laws of Marx. To discern the trigger of events (as opposed to their full background), we almost need to stand Marx on his head: A man will not revolt because he is poor, but he may well take to the streets from resentment of his better-off neighbors. A huge amount of what happens in the world is the immediate result of wounded pride. SUPERBIA, and its thwarting, lies coiled at the heart of events.

Pieter Bruegel der Ältere -- Das schlimmste der sieben Laster

*

Thus, consider the astonishing wave of revolts these days in
the Arab world. The ultimate fostering causes and conditions
are many; but the spark that toppled the first of the dominoes was
the self-immolation of the Tunisian Muhammad al-Bu`azizi (محمدالبوعزيزي -- usually
transcribed Bouazizi).

Why did he do it?

The standard narrative is a dumbed-down, sanitized version of the actual roilings of Geist und Zeitgeist -- spirit and the spirit of the times. As:

When police confiscated his produce because he didn’t have a permit he became so sad that he set himself on fire in protest.

(Actually he was not a diplômé -- he may not even have finished high school. This meme crept in probably because it conforms more exactly to a self-pitying standard Western narrative: college graduate can’t find employment commensurate with his/her own outstanding excellence.)

And the New York Times:

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

March 1, 2011

Future historians will long puzzle over how the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, in protest over the confiscation of his fruit stand, managed to trigger popular uprisings across the Arab/Muslim world.

Future historians may indeed wonder, if that is the narrative they are working from. Such an account leaves it incomprehensible why the man resorted to such an act -- “They took my bahnahhnahs! Pass the kerosene!” -- nor why it resonated so sharply among the populace: the more so since, as these same accounts acknowledge, petty police harassment of vendors was an everyday thing: a harassment that, indeed, pales beside the tortures that go on in the prisons, out of sight. And it highlights the foolishness of the Monday Morning Quarterbacks who point fingers at the intelligence community and demand to know why it did not predict this.

This is not a narrative that Western liberals wish to
hear. Neither Thomas
Friedman, sucking such factors as “Google Earth”, “the Beijing
Olympics”, and “something I’ve dubbed ‘Fayyadism’ ” out of his outsize thumb to
explain it all, nor Hillary Clinton, peddling
her one-size-fits-all Wellesley agenda around the world, is furthering
comprehension. Nor will Marx help much -- more like Freud.

Die materialistische Theorie, auf den Kopt gestellt

Update: Indeed, as reported in the 4 April 2011 New
Yorker: "The initial slogan was 'Dignity Before Bread', because
Bouazizi was humiliated.”

The basic point here is not new.Perhaps the bottom of this page may become a repository of
similar observations.Thus,
Christine Stansell (American Moderns, p. 140), on the anarchist Emma Goldman
(whose floruit antedates America’s entry into WWI, and thus the Russian
Revolutions and the foundations of the subsequent CPs):

She argued that it was “spiritual hunger and unrest”, not
just economic oppression, that drove people to rebel.

Bertram D. Wolfe's autobiography, A Life in Two Centuries
(1981):

War fits even less than nationalism
into the materialist interpretation of history.… The driving forces of modern war are fierce untamable mass
massions -- pride, anger, xenophobia … The ‘war aims’, thematerial motives and
calculations, had hastily to be improvised after war erupted, to give the
irrational explosion … an ostensibly rational explanation…

And, again in a Muslim context:

Pakistan’s generals and
diplomatswere proud but easily bruised.

-- Steve Coll, Ghost Wars
(2004), p. 516

In the American sociological tradition, motives similar to
these (which I have called by the grand old word Pride) have been discussed more academically and sedately under the rubric status anxiety.A valid perspective, certainly, but one
that does not quite manage to get its arms around the deep upheavals that are
shuddering through much of the world today.You don’t go to the public square and set yourself on fire
out of status anxiety.

For a classic analysis of the role of Thwarted Superbia as the hidden key to mass behavior, see the classic account by Bernard Lewis, "The Roots of Muslim Rage" (1990).

~

When a subset seeks political independence,

Its intellectuals will exchange
second-class citizenship [in the extant larger polity] for a first-class
citizenship [albeit in a second-rate state] plus great privileges based on
rarity;its proletarians will exchange
hardships-with-snubsfor possibly
greater hardships with national identification.

-- Ernest Gellner, Thought and
Change (1964), p. 172

[Updates & Afterthoughts]

Gideon Rachman meint, dass die Anerkennung eines verletzten
Nationalstolzes in vielen internationalen Krisenherden eine wichtige Rolle bei
der Konfliktlösung spielen könnte. "The implication of all this is that
solving international conflicts may involve thinking as much about emotions as
about interests. Sometimes the concession required to address a sense of
national or cultural humiliation may be impossible. Nobody is going to concede
a caliphate to tend to the wounded feelings of Isis. But sometimes the gestures
required to restore a sense of national pride may be relatively minor. Greece does
not seem to have extracted significant concessions from its creditors.
Nonetheless, a display of national defiance, combined with some linguistic and
technical changes, appears to have mollified the Greeks for now. As the west
contemplates a dangerous conflict with Russia and the ambitions of China, it
might remember that symbols can sometimes matter almost as much as
substance."

Each morning in public school, from primary through junior high, we began the day with the Lord’s Prayer. Jew and Gentile, churched and unchurched, we all -- we each -- recited it with folded hands.

Our Father, who art in Heaven,

hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Give us, this day, our daily bread;

and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

(It went on for a couple of lines more, which add nothing and are out of keeping with the terse efficiency of the rest of the prayer. I regularly omit them when praying alone; and was delighted to learn subsequently that they are apparently not original, but a later addition.)

This healthy exercise was later abolished by the PC Police, as being damaging to non-Christians (though the content of the prayer, as distinguished from its provenience, is not specifically Christian).

Well, was it? I am in a position to testify to one case at any rate, since I came from a family of lapsed Unitarians and did not attend church.

It was not damaging in the least. The recitation was a quiet, thoughtful time; it was an experience in community with one’s classmates, like reciting the Pledge of Allegiance (has that been abolished too, as discriminating against illegal immigrants and people clinging to dual citizenship?) On most days, in those safe and pleasant but intellectually mediocre pre-Sputnik public schoolrooms, it was our sole contact with anything loftier than the ABC’s, or with any style of language antedating “Hound Dog” (1956).

The first hint that there might be any rift within the lute, came at a family summer camp when I was around nine. We all stood outdoors in a large circle, and the head of the camp, a proper white-haired woman, lead us in the prayer. Before we began, she stipulated: “Let’s say it with tresspasses, and not …. the other.” I had no idea what she meant by this mysterious unspoken “other”, and would not for some years more, but her faint frown and pursed lips are with me yet.

Eventually I heard the version “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”. It sounded strange (and now has an unwelcome resonance, in this subprime age of mass welshing, both at the individual and the national level). I looked at the Latin, and sure enough: debita nostra. But then the Latin is simply one translation of the Gospel Greek. And that in turn is a translation of whatever it was that Jesus said: and Jesus spoke Aramaic.

*

For illumination, I turned to my learnèd friend and spiritual advisor, Dr. Massey.

The Greek opheilemata (and verb) means more literally "debts." But it can also mean "trespasses." There is a perfectly good word for sin -- hamartia -- which, along with the Hebew root OUA, etymologically meant "to miss the mark with an arrow".

Matthew has forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. But Luke has forgive us our sins as we forgive our debtors.

This shows us that Matthew is the original text and even Luke didn't understand it.

Jesus uses the example of forgiving debts as an example of how we should forgive one another (Matt 18).

But why does the prayer use debt instead of sin?

I'm not sure that any authoritative answer exists.

I'm tempted to say that this may all go back to an infelicitous translation into Greek from an original Aramaic statement. Perhaps the same is true of the equally puzzling "Lead us not into Temptation."

This one’s puzzling, from the standpoint of political psychology. You would imagine that GE -- which can pretty much structure its balance sheet any way it wants -- would carefully arrange to pay at least some token US taxes, so as to deny the New York Times the headline that it pays none. This is beyond brazen: part and parcel of the new ethos of greed without shame.

Friday, March 25, 2011

Donald Rumsfeld popularized the syntactic quirk of framing a simple statement in the form of a question which one answers oneself:“Is the cat on the mat?Yes, definitely.”Initially this may have been a rhetorical move to drown genuine pointed questions from reporters in a bog of pseudo-questions, along the lines of:

Reporter:“Why did you refuse to supply up-armored Humvees to the troops?”

Rummy:“Were mistakes made? Certainly.By Democrats, by Republicans, by liberals, by the media in general.Is the war effort producing results?Yes, daily.”

But eventually it became a linguistic tic -- one quite in keeping with the self-absorbed life of potentates dwelling in a bubble.The public failed to fight back with withering and unrelenting scorn, and now the virus has spread among the population at large.

Now here is a new bleb that has appeared upon the body politic -- perhaps it is not yet too late to lance it.I refer to the phrase,“Well, again, …”

Presumably this phrase first reared its ugly rump in Congressional testimony.There, indeed, “questions” get “asked” over and over again, not to elicit an answer, but to grandstand.So the person giving testimony naturally tires of repeating himself, and might legitimately use that phrase.But it has spread far outside that context.

As:Robert Siegel ofNPR just now interviewed some twerp from the White House about our attack on Libya.Opening greetings were exchanged;Siegel asked a question;and the gormless dwarf answered:“Well, again, ….”.Obviously there was no possibility of a legitimate use here;the NPR audience was being introduced to this pygmy for the first time.The troll went on to use the bastard phrase several further times in the course of the interview:and it was interesting to note, that these weasel words usually introduced an evasion.Thus they serve something of the function of Rumsfeld’s fake self-questions:to scatter tinsel in the air and confuse the radar, in the pretense that we are all just going over old ground, the reporter’s question was uninteresting, the listener might just as well tune out.

We hereby heap scorn upon that wretched shrunken munchkin and all his ilk.Perhaps this changeling “Well, again….” may yet be strangled in the cradle, with its own umbilical cord.

Monday, March 21, 2011

A notable feature of the Yemeni resistance has been the relatively peaceful and disciplined behavior of the protestors, in a land alas not known for either discipline or peace. Particularly noteworthy is that the protestors have been, for the most part, unarmed -- this in one of the most democratically armed countries on earth. They have faced armed government thugs weaponless -- by choice and not necessity.

That statement might seem to be belied by images you may have seen of tribesmen milling around Taghyir Square with an alarmingly large dagger at the front of their belt. This is the jambiya(**), the traditional wide-bladed curved weapon. Its use is principally ceremonial, not for real fighting. Sometimes they are almost comically large and impractical. More care is lavished on the belt and on the handle (rhinoceros horn is especially prized [***]) than on the blade. The latter, on some cheap ones I’ve seen, might serve to cut butter -- but not if it had been in the fridge. The tribesmen left their real weapons at home.

So far as it goes, this augurs well for the (inshallah) post-Saleh era. The principle challenge to the nation -- dwindling water resources (and the qat plant that sucks them up) -- cannot be solved by force of arms.

(**) Normally so spelled in English , though underlyingly it is janbiya (then pronounced with anticipatory assimilation), as witnessed by the plural, janaabi.
[***] The most highly prized are made from the horn of a unicorn: but these have not been seen since the time of Solomon.

Each Yemeni tribe is concerned with defending its own territory, and its own members. But this is not on the level of “my tribesman right or wrong”. There is a long and carefully crafted tradition of mediation and reparation. Indeed, by comparison with our own legal system, it has certain points of advantage. A system, less of laws than of justice, you might say; though like all things here below, imperfectly implemented.

So I don’t think that, once Saleh is gone, there would necessarily be civil war. My general impression -- admittedly, it is only that -- is that Yemenis are an exceptionally sweet-tempered people. (Such is, indeed, their own self-impression: al-yamaniyiin saaliyiin, as they say.) Rough around the edges, and many current deficiencies, but with a core of good nature that will serve them well once they take their destiny into their own hands.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

The current issue of the New York Review of Books has a couple of especially fine reviews.

(1) He reads it so you don’t have to

One of the very best books I have read, and re-read, concerning the life of faith, is Bare Ruined Choirs, by Gary Wills. He is best known for historical and political writing, but always this foundation lies at the back of it.

There is perhaps nothing on this planet -- nothing inside the Oort cloud -- that could interest me less than some TV special starring Sarah Palin. On the other hand, there is no keener analytic mind than that of Janet Malcolm: if she puts her byline to something, it is worth a read, however unlikely the subject. This proves true once again:

[Note to nonprofessional philosophers:
The following follows the classic treatment of W.V.O. Quine, in Word and Object.]

This Sunday's papers contained an interesting report from America’s premier naturalist, Mark Trail. It offered a curious observation, of interest to linguistic analysis in the style of Quine, and to the theory of Mind generally.

According to this consummately reliable source, our furry friends the prairie dogs, are preyed upon by coyotes. But they are difficult to catch, since these loveable rodents dwell in gigantic underground colonies (a single one of which, in Texas, once numbered 400 million -- now that’s a lot of prairie dogs), with a great many escape hatches. The instant any one of them spots a coyote, it lets loose with “Gavagai !!!” (or squeaks to that effect), at which distress signal everybody -- pop! underground. Leaving the coyote going mad with hunger.

But! There’s a catch. -- Let Dr. Trail himself tell it, since we can scarcely improve upon his prose:

Sharp-eyed [ed. note: and also furry] prairie dogs [oh and -- did we neglect to mention? -- also cute] sound the alarm when coyotes approach, but the coyote seems to know that these creatures can’t count. With his mate he trots along in plain sight, right through the mound city. The inhabitants all dive into their tunnels as he continues on his way. But his mate stops and quietly crouches among the mounds.

The first curious rodent who pops out to watch his enemy depart suddenly becomes the coyotes’ dinner.

Now, from this we may conclude, that apud the sciurideans, the vocalization “Gavagai!” does not mean “Lo, coyotes!”, but more something along the line of “Lo, undetached coyote parts!”, or “Lo, Platonic ideal of coyotehood currently manifested locally!”. In any event, the denotatum is a mass noun, not a count noun, and does not obey the digital rules of subtraction.

Dr. Trail goes on to report that, by such means, the prairie-dog population has declined by a whopping 98% over the past century.

Canny Darwinians will, however, already have noted the likely result of all this. By ruthlessly culling the fluff-head innumerates of the population, generation upon generation (quite a good idea, really), Mother Nature (note to secularists: that's Natural Selection in drag) is insuring that those who are eventually left will be the mathematically most astute animals on earth. Already we perceive the distant sound of scribbling upon chalkboards, in the M.I.T.- corridor-like underground tunnels.

-- This just in! Actual footage of a prairie dog suddenly conceiving the solution to the Riemann Hypothesis! (This fellow has generally been known, in despite of taxonomy, as the “Dramatic Hamster”, for assonance’ sake. But he’s really a prairie dog.)

Further proof that prairie dogs have already become the linguistic wizards of the animal kingdom here.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

In the first volume (Hadhramaut) of the multi-volume masterwork of M. le comte de Landberg, a Swede writing in French about Yemeni Arabic, Etudes sur les dialectes de l’Arabie Méridionale (adequately to praise which, words fail in every language), we find a panoramic portrait of music and poetry in nineteenth-century Yemen. And one transcribed piece begins thus:

dan dan daani dan, dann-dandan…

This ancient refrain (the “doo-wop” of Felix Arabia -- sometimes referred to by the noun dandaana) is with us yet:

Classical Arabic poetry is characterized by rhythmic complexity; and we certainly see this here, in a delivery that is not so much syncopated as… phlogisticated. Yallah!

Here the incomparable Muhammad al-Adra`i does not take the easy path of satire, nor of bare defiance: he sings, with love and longing, of the wretchedness into which his own country has fallen -- a plunge as tragic as the bursting of the Ma’rib dam, lo those many centuries ago… The song contrasts the condition of “people” -- al-naas -- that is, other people, normal people -- with the sad state of “us”: the folk of Yemen.

There is a word for this in Arabic, Tarab -- scarcely translatable (unless it be by the Portuguese fado): in music, elation and anguish, intertwined like the rose and the briar … Those more knowledgeable than I, must weigh in as to the musical mode, which seems to go back as far as Orpheus.

Superficially, visually, the present piece may resemble that posted earlier, al-naas yuriid isqaaT al-niZaam. But it is really quite different -- and hints at something of the range of this consummate artist, previously known only as a comedian. In the earlier piece, he played the buffoon, with lots of wordplay, and deliberately let himself be squashed by the resolute audience, by running on a bit over the prescribed length of the verse (much like the dithering President he was imitating): but the People will not be deterred, they chime in intoning “The People demand the fall of the regime”, right on time, every time. -- In the present piece, by contrast, there is no psychic split between singer and audience: all lament, in exaltation, their fallen state. (Actually, come to think of it, a perfect piece for Lent…)

الشعب يريد اسقاط النظام

I don’t usually allude to Arabic on these pages, for a number of reasons; but currently we are witness to acts of stunning bravery and discipline in many parts of the Arab world. In particular in Yemen, where a broadening coalition of workers, intelligentsia, and tribal peoples, add their traditional good-natured humor to the mix. And here we see the long history of Yemeni political poetry coming brilliantly to fruition in a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk of poetry, music, dance, and fist-pumping all in one, performed recently in Taghyir Square -- literally 'Change Square', the recently bestowed nom de guerre of the esplanade abutting the University in San`aa, after Tahrir Square ('Liberation Square', as in Cairo) was pre-emptively occupied by government supporters. (The words rhyme in Arabic; and in that sense, were a taste of things to come. Think: May '68, Paris.)

You would have to go back to the Berlin of the Weimar republic to find any comparably excellent mix of artistry and insurrection. And even that is not really comparable, since Brecht and his buddies performed in the relative safety of fashionable cabarets -- not in the public square, surrounded by the police.

محمد الأضرعي

a comedian and activist from Dhamar. Here, he chants a witty ironical poem, written for the occasion. This, over an ostinato or basso continuo (“The People -- demand -- the fall of the regime!”), courtesy of the masses in attendance at this historic demonstration. Towards the end, new themes join the mix: the national anthem (“Bilad al-Yemen”), and an anthem born of the Tunisian struggle, which has spread across the borders (“Idha l-sha`b yawman arâd al-Hayaa”). This intricate blend is notable in itself, since traditionally Arab music has not been polyphonic.

Antiphony, by contrast, is quite characteristic of Arab political demonstrations, leading to much more interesting chants than the monotonous old monophony of our own antiwar demos during Vietnam ("Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" -- da capo al fine, ad nauseam). Here the relation between the chant-leader and the mass audience is more complex, since he does not overtly share their point of view, but pretends to be President Saleh pleading with "his" people: "Oh you who have been patient for a year -- it wouldn't hurt you to just sit tight another day. Please, don't be precipitate -- even if the heat turns scorching. Why the hurry? Please, people, whaddaya say you just chill out -- say, for another thirty days." (A veiled allusion to Saleh's thirty-two years in office.) -- Solidly, stolidly, the demonstrators reply with the refrain in one voice: al-sha`b -- yuriid -- isqaaT al-niDHaam !

[Update 25 III 11: ] This slogan, incidentally, has gone international. It was the arrest of children in Syria for spray-painting it, that triggered the deadly riots and repression in Dar`aa (درعا‎)
Similarly, the simple central slogan in Cairo's Tahrir Square, irHal 'Leave! Depart! Hit the road!' resounds in Yemen as well, and is painted on arms and faces. Often, though, with a Yemeni twist, in wry allusion to the profusion of local subdialects in that fractured land: irHal ya`ni barra` ya`ni ... -- as it were, "Scram! (and if you don't know that word) Skedaddle! (and if that one baffles you) Vamoose!"

[update 1 May 2011]
South of the Sahara, the popular protest chant comparable to the Arabic al-sha`b yuriid isqaaT al-niZaam -- or simply, "irHal!" is the French "Quitte le pouvoir !", originally from Ivory Coast. Recently this slogan has achieved prominence in Burkina Faso.

Monday, March 14, 2011

“Mathematics appears to be not about anything at all. On such a view, it has no subject-matter.”

When confronted with such a pronouncement, we resort to the Weierstrass Penguin Test: namely, does the same objection apply to penguins? What are they “about”? Well, in the colloquial sense, they are all about : playing, swimming, sliding on their tummies, and all the rest; but that is not a meta-level aboutness. They are not the less funny and fat, for all that.

When someone speaks of mathematics, dismissively, as not being “about” anything, we suspect he never made it past simple arithmetic, and finds the integers pale and spectral next to nice red apples. And it is true, you cannot eat the number 2 [**]; but then, neither can you really take the square root of a couple of apples.

There is plenty for mathematics to be about. Geometry is about spatial structures. Number Theory is about Our Friends the Integers. Topology is about sets together with a neighborhood system. Algebra is about relations that generalize those familiar from simple arithmetic. And so on. The reason it is hard to say what mathematics overall is “about”, other than the tautological-sounding “mathematical objects”, is that it is so rich and deep and broad. What, for that matter is literature ‘about’, or politics, or scholarship?

[**] Actually, according to the frantically nominalist view of Bertrand Russell, you can -- or a part thereof at least. Namely, those two apples, which, along with the Everley Brothers and much else, go towards making up the unimaginable vastness of duple things, which his Lordship once fancied were simpler than das, was der liebe Gott gemacht. To such extremities is the atheist obliged to travel.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Realism about mathematics is just a part -- and not the chief part -- of Realism about Reason. One can actually get along pretty well, from week to week, without having recourse to Algebraic Geometry. But Reason is at the core of our being and our freedom: and it is Reason that, in these dark days, finds itself under attack.

The case for Reason has recently been ably and gracefully put by Thomas Nagel, in The Last Word (1997); I shall not repeat his arguments, but simply urge you to buy his book.

Sheer Reason, however, is difficult to reason about. Mathematics is thus a useful testcase for the larger thesis, since when the truths of mathematics come to be known, it happens only by Reason (occasionally supplemented, it may be, by Revelation, which then however feeds smoothly into the usual operations of Reason itself: exactly like a theorem that has been proved, to your satisfaction, by someone else). Math has the added advantage of being species-neutral (unlike Ethics, and much else). It has also proved useful in opposing what Nagel calls “Darwinian imperialism” (p. 133), namely “the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind”. (I satirized this in an earlier post, “The Urysohn Metrization Theorem: an Adaptationist Account”.)

A psychologist or philosopher, soddened by overlong splashing in the swamps of Raw Feels, will tend to be satisfied, in his Gedankenexperimenten, with the most trivial sort of elementary arithmetical facts, for the organism’s tacit recognition of which a Darwinian account may seem not too far-fetched, especially to someone who doesn’t really care about mathematical reality anyhow, and thus is easily satisfied. But hyperDarwinists (not a slur -- that is Dawkins’ self-chosen label) can less readily account for our familiarity with E8. -- Though, to be sure, a deep acquaintance with this object will prove crucial for our species’ survival when, in the year 30,906, we shall be forced to flee our imploding galaxy for a cosmos in which -- but that is of no account, for Darwinian orthodoxy emphasizes that Natural Selection cannot peek into the future.

And for whoso should say, this is but a shadow-play, we offer this envoi, from a Thomist, anent the ontological agnosticism of certain linguists:

Thomas Tymoczko, introduction to New Directions in the Philosophy of Mathematics (1986, rev. 1998), p. xiii:

To account for the indubitability, objectivity and timelessness of mathematical results, we are tempted to regard them as true descriptions of a Platonic world outside of space-time. This leaves us with the problem of explaining how human beings can make contact with this reality.

Well, yes, that is indeed a question; but not a new one. The same conundrum confronts us in the Mind-Body problem; the problem of Free Will; and more simply, the problem of how you and I can communicate at all. There are even puzzles at the level of mid-level objects. The thesis of Mathematical Realism may or may not be valid, but it does not introduce a problem which we might otherwise avoid.

Friday, March 11, 2011

In a post below, I alluded to the proverb “He that toucheth pitch, shall be defiled therewith.” (Ecclesiasticus, XIII 1.) And shortly after writing that, I came upon the daily briefing from the New Oxford Review in my mailbox, with a link to this (shades of Baader-Meinhof):

We really must keep away from politics on this site -- lest, touching pitch, we be defiled: for no-one convinces anyone else, and the ensuing heat helps melt the ice-caps. But the escalating weirdness of the world compels attention. So from time to time, we’ll permit ourselves a strictly linguistic contribution to the debates. In particular, a semantic analysis of the dizzying spin which the media places upon events (or which they blandly pass on from partisan spinmeisters).

Thus, in today’s Washington Post (the print edition of which arrived unscathed on our porch, despite the morning’s downpour; kudos to the delivery-man, or to some thoughtful neighbor) the headline in the leftmost column of the front page, above the fold, reads:

NPR head ousted in wake of scandal

And that is as far as many readers will get, in our busy-busy age. Note already, though, the weasel phrase "in the wake of", which smuggles in a post hoc, ergo proper hoc suggestion.

Those who persevere to the smaller-print subhead learn further

Departure comes amid calls on Hill to defund public broadcasting

And now surely all but the most dedicated have been sucked up into the further frenzy of the workday. What impression will they take away?

Evidently that the NPR head was caught with her hand in the till, or in bed with a capybara. And that her scandalous behavior adds fuel to the (apparently bipartisan) calls on Capitol Hill to withdraw public subsidies from these miscreants.

The actual story -- and this is not in dispute -- is that a different guy, who happens to have the same surname as the ousted NPR head, and who was the chief fundraiser for NPR, did X -- was outed, and promptly left the scene. So already the natural semantic implication of the headline is seen to be aslant to the facts.

Well, what was X, that it is labeled a “scandal”? No, he was not caught in bed with a capybara either (and had he been, he would doubtless be surrounded by defenders, in this “Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That” age. -- Actually, I hear that capybaras are really sweet between the sheets.) Rather, he got caught in the old ploy we might dub the “Camel Trap”, familiar from the days of Abscam on down. Advice to Freshmen: If you are approached by some portly, pasty-faced fellows hiding beneath a keffiyah, presenting themselves as wealthy Arabian sheikhs (or Nigerian princes, for that matter), watch what you say.

Anyhow, what he did say was … well what exactly he did say was not reported, but the way the paper put it was, he “disparaged Republicans as ‘anti-intellectual’, and tea party members as racists and xenophobes”. Given the realities on the ground, that is rather like accusing the Pope of being a Papist, or disparaging bears for going number-two in the woods; but let that lie. Assume that the opinion thus expressed is seriously at variance with the facts; it remains an opinion, expressed in what the sucker assumed was privacy. (“Um, what are those microphone-like objects dangling from your necks?” “Amulets. It’s a Muslim thing.”) Now, how -- semantically, pragmatically -- do we classify such an utterance?

Traditionally, there was no word for it -- just something you disagreed with, or that was an outrageous thing to say, or whatever -- though you would “defend to the death his right to say it”. (Remember that one? In memory still green…) Then the media invented a new term to characterize a statement made deliberately and in public, and widely known to be essentially true -- but impolitic: a “gaffe”. This already was a mind-muddling assimilation of one category to another, as though we were to start calling both sheep and goats “goats”. Well, the kernel of truth to the move is that perhaps the speaker should have been more distrustful of what the spinmeisters can do with such statements, and the docility of their audience. -- Next came a further extension, more dubious still, to apply the term “gaffe” to a statement made in confidence, which then is leaked. Here the only fault of the speaker was to have failed to obey what is increasingly becoming a wise piece of advice: Never say anything to anybody, ever.

And now the Washington Post has gone the media one better (or one worse), calling the leaked statement, not a gaffe, but a “scandal”. And a scandal, mind you, against the speaker, not against the operatives who falsely represented themselves and who leaked statements made in confidence.

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The first novel-length story featuring the Murphy Bros.

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

It contains stories previously published in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock, as well as new stories never before published. Click the cover to download it to your Kindle now!

About the Author

David Justice studied French at the Sorbonne, mathematics and physics at Harvard and MIT, and math and linguistics at Berkeley.He is the author of The Semantics of Form in Arabic, in the Mirror of European Languages; and of the fictional worksI Don’t Do Divorce Cases (which includes stories originally published in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine) and Murphy on the Mount. He taught French at Berkeley, and linguistics at the University of Alberta, then worked at Merriam-Webster as Editor of Etymology (where he edited Webster’s Book of Word Histories) and as Editor of Pronunciation.He subsequently was editor-in-chief at Franklin Electronic Publishers.He is currently employed as a language analyst, and consultant for the University of Maryland. He lives with his bride of forty years, overlooking a peaceful lake.